Ask HN: First principles thinking for implementing database, security, etc.

I am part of the tech team in a fintech startup processing 100s of 1000s of payment transactions. Part of our team is inclined towards applying first principles thinking for core tech requirements such as Database or Information Security tooling. This seems to me like a lot of wasted time, as it takes our ability to focus on our core problem - payments. Our thinking bandwidth is limited (finite) and we can only focus on so many things at a time. Do other companies also spend time on reading research papers on RDBMS, NoSQL, HSM, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, etc. & build their decisions from the ground up? Would like to know how other tech companies approach this.